REV. DR. DRURY. of which his father retained a good deal of traditional knowledge. Here, at this last-named residence, an estate and mansion of some degree of loca i importance continued in the family until the beginning of the last century, when it was finally alienated, and left the immediate line, of which we are treating, with no other patrimonial possession but the vain and empty honour of a long-drawn ancestry. The extravagances and imprudence of the last owner of Holt were the immediate causes of this decay. Dr. Gibson, afterwards the excellent and pastoral Bishop of London*, was a faithful and tried friend of the family, and offered, for their sake, to arrest the sale, by taking on himself the redemption of certain encumbrances. It is not known for what reasons such a prop was never applied; but the probability is, that in this, as in so many similar cases, the edifice, when thoroughly inspected for the calculation of repairs, was found in a much more decayed and rotten state than the owner had represented it; in other words, that the aid which friendship nobly offered was inadequate for the purposes required, when all the real facts of the case were laid open. The elder son of the last landed proprietor of this line became a lawyer at Colchester, where he is buried. He is mentioned in the "Biographia Dramatica," as the author of some few unimportant pieces for the stage, long since, and, it should seem, not undeservedly, consigned to oblivion. He was a man by no means of a disposition or habits likely to redeem the broken fortunes of his family. Mr. Thomas Drury, father of the subject of this memoir, was the younger brother of the dramatist. He led a life of comparative obscurity, and owed most of the comforts of his old age to the affection of his son, who had the opportunity of administering those comforts during many years, as his father lived to the year 1805, when he died at the advanced age of eighty-seven. He was a man of amiable • Born in 1669; of Queen's College, Oxford; Bishop of Lincoln, 1715; of Lendon, 1720; deceased, 1748. In biographical neces of this excellent and learned man there are many traits of a noble and gene, ous spirit. manners, with a good deal of old jacobite predilection about him, and fond of discoursing on subjects of divinity. John Wesley used occasionally to join him at his supper table; and as, fortunately for their colloquial pleasure, there were some points upon which their opinions never came at all nearer by discussion, such occasional meetings were enlivened by as much of quiet, social debate as Wesley's strict economy of time would admit. Joseph, the eldest son of this Mr. Thomas Drury, was born in London, February 11. 1750, O. S. No records of his early childhood are now accessible; and we only know that he became, in 1762, a king's scholar at Westminster. Dr. Hinchcliffe, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, and Dr. Smith, father of the late Dean of Christ Church, were the masters under whom he was educated; and, to Westminster scholars especially, it may not be uninteresting to learn that among his most intimate associates of the same, or nearly the same, class and standing, were the Rev. Edward Smedley, long one of the assistant masters of Westminster; the Rev. John Templer, of Lindridge, Devon; the Rev. William Tattersal, to whose taste we are indebted for many improvements in our church psalmody; Sir William Parsons, the eminent musical composer; all of whom (with the exception of the last) reached an age almost equal to his own. To these must be added the names of Dr. Cyril Jackson, Dean of Christ Church, and his brother William, late Bishop of Oxford; who, though of somewhat older standing, were also among his most cherished schoolfellows. He has often mentioned the anecdote, that when calling on Dr. William to congratulate him on his elevation to episcopacy, the bishop reminded him of a severe poetical philippic which he had composed and recited against him at Westminster, nearly half a century before. There then was, and may probably still be, since school customs are very imperishable, some day of licence in the year, when the juniors were allowed a kind of Saturnalia, with liberty to express themselves as freely as they pleased on the manners and characters of their seniors. After the lapse of so many years, the Bishop retained a complete recollection of the verses in question; and, although these were by no means complimentary to his external graces or suavity of manners, which, indeed, were never very remarkable, he now, with great good humour, repeated them. Dr. Drury was not fortunate enough to be among the number of scholars elected from Westminster to Christ Church, a matter in which interest was very predominant, and, in consequence, passed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where the advantages, both present and prospective, in point of pecuniary provision for academical education, are of considerably less value for king's scholars. He entered at Trinity in 1768; and was placed under the tuition of Watson, subsequently the well-known Bishop of Llandaff, for whose instructions he always expressed the deepest respect and gratitude. He had not, however, kept many terms in the university before it was evident that domestic circumstances - the "res angusta domi" - would compel him to enter, by some means or other, on the active business of life earlier than most men of the same education and habits. His father's means had become even less adequate than before to furnish the supplies for college residence; and he was thus deprived of the opportunity, of which he was otherwise so capable of availing himself, of aiming at academical distinctions and emoluments, which might have forwarded his views in life, and extended his fame as a scholar. The case of Samuel Parr, a future giant in learning, was an exact parallel; and both were shortly to be thrown together on the same arena, sent to it somewhat prematurely by similar domestic circumstances. Parr, who was some years older than the subject of this memoir, had, at this time, already commenced his career. Before Mr. Drury had quite completed his twentieth year, Dr. Sumner, at that time head master of Harrow, had applied to Dr. Watson to recommend him some gentleman of good talent and scholarship to succeed to a vacant assistantship at that place. Such was the steadiness of conduct and manliness of mind, combined with sound knowledge, for his years, in Mr. Drury, that Dr. Watson did not hesitate to propose the situation to him, and recommend, that what remained of necessary college residence should be kept at such times and intervals as he could contrive to absent himself from the occupations on which he was about to enter. The strong recommendations of the tutor, together with the pupil's own desire, and sense of the necessity of relying exclusively on his own mental resources, soon decided him to accept the offer; and he embarked on the world for himself at this early age. Robert Sumner, D.D., who had been lately a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, was at this period head master of Harrow, which school was now in high repute, containing about two hundred and fifty scholars, a large proportion of whom were youths of the best connections in the country. Sumner had succeeded Dr. Thackeray in that post in 1760. At this time (1769) he was not above thirty-eight years of age; a circumstance which was of some importance to his young assistant, as the latter fell more easily into habits of ease and familiarity with a superior of that time of life, than he probably might have done with a gentleman of more advanced years: and he always spoke with great warmth of feeling of the advantages he received from this species of intercourse with a man of such a powerful and well-stored mind. The Rev. Messrs. Wadeson and Roderick were (together with Parr, who has been already mentioned,) his colleagues at his entrance on his office; and of these early associates he was fond, in after-life, of often tracing the memory. It was not, however, destined that the party should continue long together; the premature death of Dr. Sumner, at the age of forty-one, in 1771, broke it up altogether. But even this short period, passed in close observation of a man of the most varied knowledge and brilliant conversation, was not likely to be lost upon one who had by nature the highest relish for these excellences. The character of Sumner has been drawn with all the warmth of affection and zeal of admiration by his pupil Sir William Jones, in his preface to the History of Asiatic Poetry; but neither that panegyric, nor the elaborate inscription to his memory, by his pupil and friend Parr, in the church of Harrow, at all exceed the tone in which Dr. Drury always spoke of his early counsellor and, we may say, instructor. It is to be regretted that Dr. Parr never put together the memoir of the life and conversations of this able man, for which so much material was found to have been drawn together, among his papers, by his executors. Short as this intercourse was, it had a lasting effect on the manners and habits of the young instructor; for there was a great deal of that in Dr. Drury, in after-life, which was so much extolled in Sumner. A high and noble tone of feeling, a most ready and persuasive eloquence, a richness of language and copiousness of illustration, aided by a particularly fine delivery, seem to have been remarkable in both, and not the less so, that there was in both occasionally a tendency to the "Asiaticum dicendi genus." In external manners, also; in that suavity and elegance for which the subject of these pages was, through life, very conspicuous; and in the way in which playfulness of imagination was invariably under the control of good taste, much was probably to be ascribed to this early association. The succession to the vacant chair of Sumner was warmly contested by Benjamin Heath, of Eton, and Parr. In Dr. J. Johnstone's memoirs of Parr, prefixed to the late collection of his writings, will be found a very ample and, we believe, accurate detail of the whole business. The boys were naturally, and at first commendably, interested, for a native of the village, an ornament to their school in his youth, (of which he, Sir W. Jones, and Bennet, afterwards Bishop of Cloyne, had been the pride in their day,) and so very able an instructor of themselves in his manhood; and they attempted, first, by a memorial to the electors, to influence their choice; and, subsequently, on Dr. Heath's success being made known, to evince their resentment by many acts of juvenile petulance. Parr had too manly a mind to be accessary to any such conduct, and always spoke of his successful antagonist with the respect which his character and learning so : |